


Carry me with you, all through the years

by aelinlightbringer



Category: Throne of Glass Series - Sarah J. Maas
Genre: (kind of), Canon Compliant, F/M, Slow Burn, Soulmate AU, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Tattoos
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-21
Updated: 2019-03-12
Packaged: 2019-06-13 17:48:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 18,956
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15369996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aelinlightbringer/pseuds/aelinlightbringer
Summary: Soulmate AU where how you feel about your soulmate, or how you think of them, appears on their skin as tattoos.This fic is canon compliant and will feature both Aelin and Rowan's POV.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Just a quick warning--this fic is very disjointed and jumps around in time a lot (that's a product of the entire thing being written at 1 AM). If you have any questions, just let me know, and, as always, let me know what you think in the comments below :)

Aelin had been six when the ink appeared.

It was dark and almost insidious on her too-young skin. Aelin could not remember the day it happened, but she had heard stories.

The young princess, playing with her older cousin when he noticed the black ink staining her arm. Aedion had been smart for his age—still was. So he instantly knew what the stark mark on Aelin’s arm meant, even though she herself was too young to read it.

She had merely giggled at the novelty, tracing its elegant, swirling lines. Aelin didn’t remember the day she got it, but she did remember afterwards. She thought it was beautiful, even if she couldn’t read it. She tried, her brow furrowing as she sounded out the word. “T—tr—th—,” she guessed, but it was too many strange letters for her.

It only took a month for her to learn what it said, a month and a careless servant with a too-loud whisper.

Written on her six-year-old arm, the ink black against her pale unmarked skin, was the word _threat._

It was only later, when Aelin was older and the ink had changed, that she finally realized what the word ‘threat’ had meant to her parents.

Aedion had rushed to her parents, and they had both come immediately. It was not that such markings were uncommon—soulmate tattoos were fairly common. Aelin’s parents had them, the words blooming onto their skin from the moment they locked eyes. But Aelin was so _young_ , and it didn’t seem she had met anyone new that day. Aedion told her a year later about how her parents had questioned him for almost half an hour for every detail he could remember, and that was when Aelin began to realize what the words also meant for her parents. The tattoo was an uncertainty, another oddity for an already odd child.

She knew the word itself wasn’t a particular shock for her parents. Aelin had already heard it whispered around her, but her youth had protected her for a time. She couldn’t equate the whispers of _threat_ and _monster_ and _how do we control her_ with herself. After all, she was just Aelin, a little girl who held lovely fire in her veins. She couldn’t comprehend how people could see it as anything but a joy.

Then again, what had she known? She had seen her soulmate branding her as a threat and all she noticed were swirling, beautiful lines.

Her parents were hoping the tattoo would change, she knew that much. If not to something better, at least someplace less visible than her forearm. It wasn’t an unreasonable hope; tattoos changing were just as common as them appearing, because they represented how your soulmate saw you or thought about you. It was more specific for some couples than others, and changed for some more often than others. Aelin had seen the word _annoying_ cross her father’s skin one or two times, and they would then laugh about it until it faded, usually only a few minutes later. Her mother was usually _loving_ or _angelic_ or _kind_ , but sometimes a word would cross her skin that she refused to read aloud to Aelin. Aelin would hold that memory like a treasure, because what had been vexing and angering as a child made her parents seem more like real people.

 Sometimes, as Aelin lay alone at night with nothing but her thoughts, she wondered if her parents also worried for her future in that tattoo. She was a princess, a valuable commodity. Her hand in marriage could buy a truce, or gold, or fighting men. She could not help thinking of what Aedion had once told her, that her parents had hounded and hounded him to try and figure out who Aelin’s soulmate was. And Aelin couldn’t help but think that their real question was: what if Aelin’s hand had been wasted on a servant’s child passing by?

Aelin told herself that wasn’t like her parents, but the truth was she wasn’t entirely sure. She had had too little time with them, and now all she had was her memories, dwindling by the day. In truth, she could no longer remember the sound of her mother’s voice, or if her father liked sweets or not. She could no longer imagine how they would react to things, to her, to her life.

Sometimes it scared her, but sometimes she felt relieved that she could no longer imagine the truth. It must surely be an ugly thing.

Her relief terrified her more than her own fear.

 

It had been about two weeks before Aelin’s parents determined her soulmate wasn’t in the castle. She hadn’t remembered much, other than being followed by her father’s warriors constantly, being paraded around to meet the other children. By that point, her parents had explained what the tattoo meant for her (even if they had not told her what the word itself meant), and so it was a stinging experience to be rejected by the palace children a second time. Aelin had been alright with just Aedion as a friend the first time, but her young self had latched onto the idea of a soulmate, someone who would understand and complement her perfectly. But it was more than clear to everyone involved that none of the children wanted to even be near Aelin.

That left another option, though; someone who knew of Aelin, but she didn’t know herself, was her soulmate. Aedion relayed most of her parent’s conversations about it to her, as he crouched by her bed at night and listened through the walls. They were alarmed, and Aelin now understood why. It was frightening to have someone view your daughter only as a threat.

Not, again, that it was a shock to her parents that people saw Aelin this way. But she supposed the truth was ugly when it was written for all to see. There could be no evading, no justification, not when those black letters stared back at them.

 

The ink stayed, and stayed, and Aelin learned what it was and finally learned to read it. If she had been older, it might have made her laugh without mirth, or bile rise in her mouth. She did the same when she remembered it now. _Threat_ , written out in beautiful writing, the kind that made you smile and look closer until you saw what its intricate lines spelled out.

Her parents stopped worrying about their daughter’s soulmate tattoo only because tensions with Adarlan began to grow. The tattoo they hated and feared so much finally did change, only a few days after a night of blood and endless darkness with only one shining light to guide her.

Aelin did not think of that night. She did sometimes think of how her parents never got the chance to see her tattoo change.

It was the first change she had seen happen. Aelin had been in Arobynn’s manor for two or three days; she could no longer remember exactly. Things had been so different then. He had been a mere Lord of the Assassins then, and Aelin had been a child. She couldn’t see the cold steel behind his eyes. All she saw was an offer that looked like salvation, like her only choice. Aelin didn’t let herself think about lots of things from her past; what would have happened if she had chosen differently was one of those things.

She had chosen Arobynn, after all, and it had seemed like the right thing at first. She had been given clothes, and food, and her own room. It was midday and she was sitting in her room, mindlessly rubbing the ink on her forearm when it suddenly dissolved away.

Aelin had nearly fallen back in shock. She had long since thought of the tattoo as permanent, a two-year guest who was never leaving. Yet she saw it vanish from her skin just like ink dropped into water, one second black as a moonless night and the next only her pale skin (still unmarked, still pure) remaining.

Then she felt a slight tingling on her foot and the back of her neck. She had wrenched off her right shoe to see a new word coalescing on the arch of her foot. Aelin held her breath, and saw two words form. The same handwriting as the first, but less ornate. They were simple, and almost sorrowful, but that was Aelin perhaps pushing her own feelings onto it.

_A shame_ , read the ink on her foot.

She remembered the tingling on her neck, and she had reached for the hand mirror on her dresser. She had stood in front of the full-length mirror inside her armoire, and had contorted, pulling the back of her dress down and moving the mirror in her hand just so.

She saw the word there, even starker and more simple than the two on her feet, and almost dropped the mirror.

Printed at the top of her spine was just one word.

_Dead_.

 

It was that day that she shed the name Aelin, and Celaena was born. She chose to take the new tattoo as a sign that Aelin was better off dead, anyway. Aelin had died, cold and alone on a blood-soaked night, and the people of Terrasen wept for her. In her earliest days, when she still broke down often and thought of her past, Celaena mourned the girl who had fallen into that river. She thought of her parents, Aedion, her uncle—she thought of kindness and soft smiles and the endless familial love that filled her early years.

But then she reminded herself that the princess was dead. Celaena was alive and sometimes that was all she could ask for.

A year later, she killed a man for Arobynn. She had cried herself to sleep that night and thought, even at nine years old, that it was good her soulmate thought she was dead. She never wanted them to see her like this.

 

Years passed—two, then three, then four, and Celaena barely remembered the ink on her skin at all. The tattoo on her neck never bothered her, out of sight and out of mind, and she ignored the one on her foot. She thought in fleeting moments that if she gave one minute to sorrow or anger that they would drown her entirely.

So she waited, and accepted that her tattoos would be permanent. She didn’t have to ignore the _shame_ written on her foot because it lost its meaning. All Celaena thought was that it could have been worse; the words were easily hidden, and in her time as an assassin, she had learned that the words inked on people could be so, so much worse than she had ever imagined before. In a childhood of light and happiness she had thought that _angelic_ was a normal thing to be scrawled onto skin, that all soulmates loved each other endlessly.

Then again, Celaena thought, the crowd she ran in now wasn’t a good example of any way to live. Of course they had violence and insults written in along with declarations of love. It was the only way.

Celaena was fifteen when Sam finally saw the ink on the top of her spine. He had gone stiff and awkward for days afterward, which only made Celaena lash out at him in anger.

It was a year later and she was in love with him. She had not thought anything of it, of them being together, until they lay in her new apartment one day, and Sam brought it up.

Celaena had been lying in his arms when she felt the warm press of a finger on her neck. “What about this?” Sam asked softly. He nudged her bare foot with his own, where the second tattoo still lingered. “And this?”

“What about them?” Celaena countered, turning over. She saw the hurt in Sam’s eyes and remembered to be gentler. “I’ve had them since I was six.” She did not mention the original word; for all of Sam’s virtues, he would not understand. He would never need to—Celaena wouldn’t let that happen.

“They think you’re…dead?” Sam whispered, his hand now curled around the back of her neck as though he could blot the word out.

“I suppose,” Celaena said. She also didn’t mention that the tattoos had been fading over the past several years, slowly but surely. It had taken her a while to notice, and even longer to determine they really were fading and it wasn’t her imagination. She told herself it was a good thing that she’d be rid of them and would no longer have to worry about covering them with clothes or concealing paints on her more social outings. After all, Arobynn had gifted her a lovely and scandalous skin-tight suit that hid both of them well, but some missions required finesse. It was irritating how often finesse meant Celaena in a dress.

Celaena snapped back into the present and looked down at her foot, the ink now a light gray. Almost gone, she thought. “The truth is, I have no idea who they are,” she said, looking up into Sam’s eyes. She saw confusion but also relief—good. He had to know she wasn’t leaving him for someone she had never met. She said as much to him.

Sam’s eyes softened and she could see he understood now. He traced the ink on her neck in fascination rather than jealousy. He fell silent and Celaena assumed the conversation was over. She flipped her back to him again, settling against his warmth.

It was a few minutes, with the candles around them growing dimmer, before Sam spoke again. “Isn’t it odd, though?” he asked. “That they think you’re dead but you have no idea who they are?”

Celaena did not flinch at the words, and she congratulated herself for the restraint. _No_ , she almost said. _It isn’t odd at all, because, my love, I used to be quite well known. There were thousands, hundreds of thousands, who knew my name and what color my eyes were and that I was a threa—_

“I suppose so,” she answered, interrupting her own treasonous thoughts. She hadn’t had a slipup like that in a while. “I never thought about that before.”

The subject fell away and was never brought up again. Celaena was glad to see that Sam didn’t mind; she had always felt that you didn’t need a soulmate bond to fall in love, and Sam was proof of that. She sometimes wished at night that her skin would blossom with all he thought of her, because he always saw a better version of her than Celaena herself did, but she was alright with her skin staying the same. After all, Sam was still hers and she was still his. They had each other and didn’t need swirling black ink to tell them so.

Then two things happened, so close together that Celaena still could not help but wonder if they were somehow connected.

After eight years, her two tattoos finally left her. She woke up in the night to an odd sensation, and as if by instinct, she rolled out of bed, leaving Sam behind, and padded over to the window.

Her right foot was blank as new parchment.

Celaena’s breath caught in her throat and she walked quietly and quickly towards the bathroom, nearly dropping her smaller mirror in an attempt to pick it up.

She held it up, hands shaking, and turned so her back was to the large mirror above the sink. Celaena could only see by the moonlight streaming in through the window, but its light seemed to shine brighter than usual.

Her neck, too, was blessedly empty of ink. For the briefest, purest moment, it felt like a weight had been lifted off of her, a tie to her horrid past that she could finally forget.

Then she felt the barest itch across her stomach and set the mirror down with a clatter. “No, no, no,” she murmured, and her hands were shaking even worse as she pulled up the edge of her nightgown.

Grazing her hipbone and moving onto her stomach were two new words.

_Adarlan’s Assassin._

 

_Sam can’t see this_ , Celaena remembered thinking. He had seemed so comforted by the thought that Celaena didn’t know her soulmate, and she could tell he was even a little relieved they thought she was dead, whoever they were. Everything was too new between them for her to show him the newest development.

Celaena admitted to herself, too, that though the tattoo made her wary, it made her a little vain, too. The nickname had popped up as an insult at first, by older (male) assassins who said it with a sneer. To their disdain, it had caught on, and Arobynn was pleased by how Celaena’s infamy was spreading.

Whoever Celaena’s soulmate was, not that she particularly cared about them, her reputation had spread that far. And being known as Adarlan’s Assassin was safe—because no one was actually sure what Celaena looked like, under all the masks and garb Arobynn made her wear. Celaena thought back to the days when she had told herself that it was for the best that her soulmate thought she dead.

She still thought that. And nothing had changed, really; her soulmate knew her only as a title. They knew her no more than did the thousands who quaked in fear of her hard-won reputation.

Celaena was careful to cultivate her vanity. Sometimes, in her moments of clarity, she knew that her pride was the only thing that kept her from hating herself entirely.

 

Two days passed, and Celaena continued on as she had, worrying about stupid things that didn’t matter. Tattoos she had to hide. Soap she reserved for herself. A vain, foolish girl.

It was dark when they told her Sam was dead.

And Celaena had known, had always known, that love didn’t depend on ink running down her skin. Sam’s death was the final confirmation for her. He died, his skin ripped apart and bloodied, and without a single drop of ink on it—but it tore out her heart and soul just the same.

 

Celaena didn’t connect the dots for some time. She had wanted to forget, and in the mines there was nothing but forgetting. There were times in the dark when all she could remember was the name she had dreamt up for herself nine years ago, when she whispered it to herself like she could rebuild the walls of reality around her.

Celaena only got to thinking about it one night as she sat around a weak fire with the other slaves; it was a rare respite, the closest to an apology they would get for a recent cave-in that had killed a dozen slaves. 

One of the women had lightly brushed a finger across Celaena’s hipbone, but Celaena brushed it off, thinking the woman was only looking at the way Celaena’s bones had begun to push out against her skin.

Then the woman murmured to her, “You are very lucky to have this”, and Celaena realized that one of the many rips on her worn dress revealed a sliver of the skin on her hip, just enough to see the inky black of her tattoo, too dark and clean to have been made with human hands.  

“Thank you,” Celaena said, her voice as pleasant as she could make it. She was tired, and starving, and worn out, but she used all of her energy to remain polite to the others. They were all she had, now. Celaena was just grateful that the woman couldn’t read the tattoo out right; it was considered rude to ask, or in some cultures, even to look at the tattoos, and Celaena felt that being branded as an assassin by her soulmate probably wouldn’t set the right tone.

“Is he a good man?” the woman asked, and Celaena had to hold in a sigh. She was tired. She didn’t want to think about the past. She didn’t want to think about the ink and all it reminded her of.

“I don’t even know if they’re a man,” Celaena said lightly. “We’ve never met.”

The woman made consoling noises, and launched into a story that Celaena only half listened to. Some people found comfort in talking to others, even in this hell on earth. Celaena thought it made them feel more like a human instead of a tool to be used.

But now her own mind was swirling around the ink, around the events that had taken place. It had changed, and two days later Sam was dead. She went over it and over it, trying to find the link.

Her tattoos had only ever changed twice—in the days after Terrasen had burned and her family had been killed, and then days before Sam died. Celaena watched the flames of the fire burn out, and she thought that the ink on her skin was a bloodhound of death, always nipping at its heels.

When that thought became unbearable, she tried to rationalize it. Her soulmate didn’t know who she was, and they were not predicting the tragic events in her life; they were just a person, someone whose thoughts appeared on her skin in lovely tattoos. The first change in her tattoos made sense—whoever her soulmate was learned of the princess’ death a few days after it happened. Understandable. And the timing was odd with the second change, but it was odd and nothing more. It was a strange coincidence, just another casual cruelty in a long line of them.

She pondered it that night by the fire, and then no more.

There wasn’t any light to think by in that place. There was only darkness, and forgetting.

  

It had been a year or five or ten or ten thousand and then a shining prince came to save her. Celaena barely had the willpower to tug on a personality, but she managed it. One of the snarky ones that she thought may even have been real. Maybe even was real, still.

She had spent too long in the darkness to remember.

 

The shining prince wanted her to win a contest for him. So she played along. The trials were full of blood and death and threats but she had known those all her life, or so it felt. The feel of a dagger in her hand was like whispering in a lover’s ear, and like any lover, Celaena felt she could no longer remember what her life had been like before.

Yet even amidst the blood and death, she felt herself healing. Slowly, on the inside, where no one could see but where she could feel a stagnant heart begin to beat again.

Celaena wondered to herself, almost shyly, if the shining prince was the one whose ink she wore, because when she looked at him it felt right. Being near him felt right, and easy, and comforting. Not like with Sam, but nothing was ever like it was with Sam.

Then one day she caught a glimpse of handwriting on his shoulder. The handwriting was spiky and slightly sloppy, like it had been written down in a hurry.

_Crown Prince,_ his tattoo read.

Celaena smiled softly at that, and knew instantly the ink was not for her. Celaena had thought lots of things about Dorian—but never that he was the Crown Prince. It wasn’t her handwriting, anyway.

 

Later Celaena thought that it was the Captain of the Guard. It made more sense for Chaol, even at ten years old, to think of her as a threat. She almost laughed thinking about it, because it was such a Chaol thing to think. And he would have known of her death and later her reputation as Adarlan’s Assassin. It hurt a little, to have Chaol think of her only as Adarlan’s Assassin, but that was only a minor bump in her happiness.

Even when she saw every inch of his skin, and every inch was blank, she denied the truth in front of her. Celaena thought that all they needed was time. Some soulmate bonds didn’t lock in instantly, after all.

(Well, at least she’d heard stories like that. She had to believe they were true.)

Celaena had once thought herself wise to see that love was not made of swirling ink and nebulous bonds, but she had fooled herself with Chaol. There was love there, but she wanted more. So she ignored the unchanging tattoo on her hip. She ignored the blank skin of her lover.

It took the brutal murder of her closest friend for her to see the truth.

 

When she boarded the ship to Wendlyn, grief weighing her down like a cloak she could not shrug off, the tingle across her collarbone felt almost inevitable. She did not move from where she stood at the bow.

Celaena had once convinced herself, over a dying fire, that the words on her skin bore no relation to the tragedies in her life.

Now, gliding across deep blue water, an amethyst ring on her finger and the feeling of blood still on her hands, she could not help but wonder if she had been fooling herself yet again.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As promised ;)

It was the anniversary of Lyria’s death, and Rowan was in Doranelle. Maeve had always let Rowan stalk away from the city on this day in the past, though he still didn’t know why. Maeve was many things, but Rowan had never fooled himself into thinking _kind_ was one of them.

He knew logically that being in Doranelle should not have bothered him. He was bound to his Queen by blood and honor; he should not have felt bitter that she had called on him today. She owned him every day of the year.  

Fenrys and Connall were already waiting, murmuring amongst themselves. Fenrys grinned at Rowan, and he ignored the young male. He would attend this meeting as his Queen had ordered, and he would leave Doranelle as soon as he could. Already it was a struggle to beat against the tide of grief that threatened to weigh him down. In his mind, he could see the ink that had been on his skin, in that lovely scrawl of Lyria’s—and then he saw it blink away in one horrid instant, the instant he knew his mate was gone.

Rowan forced himself into the present. He was in Doranelle. He was with his blood-sworn brothers. He had to focus.

Vaughan and Gavriel entered the room next, and Rowan could not help the slight curiosity he felt. Maeve had said they needed to discuss something urgent, but it was rare that all of Maeve’s blood-sworn were together. Very rare indeed.

Gavriel sat next to Rowan although the table was meant to seat dozens.

“Rowan,” he greeted, polite but warm.

“Gavriel,” Rowan returned. “I thought you and Vaughan were elsewhere.” They had left months ago, ordered by Maeve to quell a simmering feud on a distant border.  

“We traveled day and night to return by her orders,” Gavriel answered, his eyes flickering to the door. Lorcan was walking in, the last, as usual. Rowan turned away from the male.

Maeve walked in only moments later. She brushed a hand along Fenrys’ shoulder as she walked by, and Rowan looked away from that as well. Several Fae walked behind Maeve. A few of her spies who she had sent across the ocean—Rowan recognized them all. He had been there the day that Maeve had sent them away. 

“There has been news,” Maeve began, sitting down at the head of the table. “From Terrasen.” She nodded to a female standing beside her. Endra, Rowan thought her name was.

The female turned to address the cabal sitting in front of her. “I have confirmed reports of Aelin Galathynius. She has inherited the magic from her father’s line, although none from her mother, it seems.” The spy glanced once at Maeve, and Rowan knew she was struggling to hold back the words they were all thinking.

The princess had not just inherited “magic from her father’s line”. It was Brannon’s fire that she had inherited. The spy, wisely, continued without saying the words directly.

“She is just a child, but appears powerful. Her parents struggle to control her—”

“It is just as I warned them,” Maeve interrupted. “Their blood was too volatile, and now they pay the price for their treachery.”

“She is a child,” Vaughan said. “Barely six years old—”

Maeve whipped her head around and Vaughan fell silent instantly. “A child who is already known to half the world. Other rulers are clamoring over themselves to get a single look at her.”

Maeve turned back to Endra, who nodded in confirmation. “It is true—yet it seems many of these requests are being denied.”

“She is six years old.” It was Fenrys interrupting this time. “Her parents have a right to deny those _requests_ ,” he said, his voice acidic, “just as those rulers have a right to make them. They are living on the same continent. _We_ are an ocean away.”

Maeve’s eyes glittered darkly, yet Fenrys did not look away. Rowan tensed, curling his fingers around the armrest of his chair, and wondered if Maeve would then order him to pick up a whip. Other members of her cabal had been punished for less. Rowan had been punished for less.

Maeve just leaned back, and Rowan heard the soft sigh of relief that Gavriel couldn’t hide. “You’re awfully quiet, Rowan,” Maeve said, turning towards him.

He was quiet another moment, gathering his thoughts. “I understand the conflict that Fenrys and Vaughan feel. She is a child,” he began. “However, as your commander, I suggest caution above all. She may be young, but Aelin Galathynius is also a threat.”

Maeve smirked at the last word, an expression of smug satisfaction crossing her face for the briefest moment.   

 

Rowan is not in Doranelle when he hears of Aelin Galathynius’ death.

The details he hears are horrific. An entire royal family slaughtered in the span of a few days. There may be survivors, he hears, a cousin or two but nothing more. No one important enough to inspire Terrasen to rise up against their new conquerors.  

There is something wrong about it all—about the mighty Terrasen falling, and Maeve’s refusal to help, and the blood soaking the faraway continent. Violence is spreading, and Rowan had warned Maeve that Adarlan may turn their eyes towards Wendlyn next, but she did not heed his warning. She told him it was not his place, that he was young and naïve, even though it has been hundreds of years since anyone has called Rowan _young._

Rowan had left Doranelle in anger weeks ago, and Maeve let him go. As uneasy as the tensions in Erilea made him, Maeve was right. There was peace in Wendlyn, and no need for Maeve to keep such a tight leash on all her blood-sworn. Rowan was in a coastal town, one that he had already forgotten the name of, when he heard the news. It was all he heard for days. Most Fae cared little for their brethren across the sea—so few argued against Maeve’s decision to let them die—but the fall of Terrasen interested them, and so Rowan heard of the murders only three days after they happened. He was furious. Disgusted.

He heard conflicting stories. Some said Aelin’s parents were killed by a foul magic, while others insisted it was merely an assassin sent by the King of Adarlan. All the accounts agreed, though, that Aelin Galathynius’ body was never found. Some rumors even whispered that there was a chance she lived. Rowan did not believe them for a second. Aelin Galathynius was a mere child, eight years old if he remembered correctly. If the assassin who killed her parents didn’t get her, then Rowan was sure someone or something else did. It might have been hunger. It might have been a soldier from the army that swept through Terrasen after the slaughter of the royal family. It doesn’t matter, in the end. A child is dead.  

It’s a shame, Rowan thinks. A disgusting, horrible shame.  

 

The years go by and Rowan Whitethorn thinks of many things. He thinks of Adarlan’s continued aggression. He thinks of the countries falling to it, again and again, and he thinks of the alliances that must be maintained to prevent Wendlyn from falling as Erilea has. He thinks of significant things like supply lines and the Ashryver armada, and minor things like a talented demi-Fae who made it into Doranelle, and Fenrys’ continued distaste of his blood oath.

Rowan Whitethorn is Maeve’s commander, and thus he thinks of the horrors of the world by necessity. He does not think of himself as the forgetful type, but some horrors fade away. There are simply too many to remember them all.

He does not realize it, but day by day he thinks less and less of Aelin Galathynius. The shame that was her murder is overcome by the other atrocities that Adarlan commits, until one day, without realizing it at all, Rowan Whitethorn thinks no more of Aelin Galathynius.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you guys SO MUCH for all the support on this fic!! Every kudos, comment, subscription and bookmark means so much to me!

In her time on the boat Celaena refused to acknowledge the new tattoo. The old tattoo on her hip had gone, the shortest lived one yet, and she refused to acknowledge that as well. Nothing good had ever come from her looking at them—she distantly wondered if ignoring them might help. So she sat at the side of the boat, watching the deep water race by, and shoved down any desire to look at the new ink on her collarbone.

She made it to Wendlyn and did not look into a mirror for three days. Celaena had wanted to hold out, to refuse to look at the change as though that would make it disappear permanently, but her curiosity was too strong.

Though—thinking about it, Celaena decided that description wasn't quite right. In truth, Celaena was watching as she sank into apathy and numbness. It frightened her, but she couldn’t stop no matter what she tried. All she felt was empty, and so when curiosity began to hum lightly, she jumped on the chance. She had promised herself she wouldn’t look at the tattoo, but the promise that really mattered was the one she had made to Nehemia. She had to survive to do that.

So Celaena leapt at her curiosity, hoping the dull flame would warm her cold chest. She slipped into an inn, broke into an empty room easily enough, and walked over to the mirror mounted on the wall. She would prefer to be gone before anyone noticed.

She avoided the dead eyes staring back at her, and pulled down the stained collar of her shirt.

The tattoo was the same beautiful handwriting, elegant swirls that seemed to want to call attention to themselves. They flirted with Celaena’s collarbone, begging for the viewer to notice its own fine lines.

Celaena saw it and wanted to laugh or scream or cry.

“Hello, old friend,” she said instead, her voice dead and flat. She had been wrong; indulging her curiosity had not brightened the flame she felt. It had smothered it, with memories of blood and screams and a rushing river. Her chest had turned cold and empty.

On her collarbone lay the word _threat_.

 

Celaena lay in the Wendlyn sun for weeks with that tattoo on her collarbone, with only her numbness and a nearby hawk for company. It circled in the sky above and reminded Celaena of herself—winding in circles through life, convinced she was escaping when all along she was tethered to the same fate she’d run from in the first place. On and on and on it went.

(In the place between dreaming and waking, Celaena wondered if the next word on her skin would be _dead_. She wondered if it would be true this time.)   

Then, one day when her head was pounding in a particularly nasty way, she felt the tingle on her skin that she had come to know intimately as the arrival or departure of a tattoo.

She felt the itch on her collarbone and on the back of her neck, just below where the word _dead_ used to lie on her skin.

Celaena bolted upright, although her head was spinning and suddenly the roof didn’t seem as steady as it was before. _Threat_ was gone from her skin, she didn’t need a mirror to tell that, but that didn’t make her feel any safer. Something was written on the back of her neck, and she wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to find out.

Every change had accompanied some horrid loss in her life, but now Celaena had nothing left. Nothing for the ink to take from her. Except her life—not that she herself considered that very valuable. Still, Celaena felt the stirrings of survival instinct in her, and she made her way down the roof as carefully as she could. The ink lived on her skin, so she could not outrun it—but perhaps she could outrun the consequences. If she didn’t, Celaena wasn’t sure she would survive the next reckoning that it took.

Her head was still half-spinning, and she was mistaken for a homeless vagrant, when she heard a low laugh behind her. The laugh was cold and slightly malicious, and Celaena suspected she had not been able to outrun her fate.

She turned around to see a full-blooded Fae warrior stalking towards her, a tattoo—the hand-inked kind—covering half of his face, and Celaena knew for certain that she had not been able to outrun anything.

 

For three days they traveled in silence. Celaena didn’t care. Her mind spun in circles made of promises written in blood and the ink on her skin. When she had first met Rowan, she had half expected him to kill her then and there. But he didn’t. He was bringing her to Maeve, exactly what she wanted. Well, what she remembered wanting. Everything felt so far away now that even this opportunity, which she would have very literally killed for, felt hollow. _Desire_ was a distant shore, faint enough that she though she remembered where it once was, she could no longer see it. Wanting anything felt out of her reach.

Celaena did not feel desire, but she felt something flickering in the ashes of her heart. She called it hope. It was an insult to the word to call it that, but Celaena had to cling to something. The changing ink had brought her Rowan, and he would bring her to Maeve. Right before she fell asleep, on a hard ground and surrounded by whispers of ancient things, Celaena thought of the slumbering hope that the new ink had brought her. Maybe, just maybe, there would not be a reckoning. Maybe the gods would decide that Celaena had finally given enough.

 

Then the lessons started, and Celaena realized she had been right all along. She cursed herself for ever thinking otherwise. It was a different torture this time, slower and burning hotter than the rest, but the new tattoo had brought consequences all the same.

She still didn’t know what the one on the back of her neck said. There was only one mirror in her room, and she wasn’t about to ask for a second one. Gods only knew what Rowan Whitethorn would make of that. And—and she didn’t entirely want to know what new word lay on her skin.

It was only a day in to her stay that everything she had grown accustomed to with the ink on her skin changed.

Celaena had thought of her tattoos by the years that she had them; the mere weeks she’d had her tattoo on the way to Wendlyn had been startling and unusual.

At Mistward, they changed by the day. Some changed by the hour. Celaena was sure that whoever her soulmate was, they were here. On the first day, she felt her skin itch three times, and she nearly broke down, convinced she was going to die. The tattoos had always signaled death for her, and here they were, popping up like daisies.

The one on the back of her neck remained, whatever horrible thing it was. Another tattoo grew along the back of her left thigh, barely visible to her, and only through major contortions.

_Spoiled_ , it read.

The second itch was on the bottom of her foot. Before she had the chance to wrench off her shoe in private, a third tingling told her it was already gone.

She didn’t die in the night, to her surprise.

 

Two days passed with no changes to her tattoos, and no deaths, only the training with Rowan and a truly dreadful experience with a not-wight. She woke up the next morning to see _stubborn_ written on her forearm, and she found herself grateful for the long sleeves that accompanied the cold weather.

Celaena had always known her soulmate existed by the ink on her skin. She had once, for the briefest time, held a fantasy in her head of what it would be like, to find them and fall in love. But then she grew up, and she learned. She learned that love did not live in ink, and that death followed her where she walked, no matter where she was. Celaena thought now, when her tattoos changed daily, that it had perhaps been foolish to equate the changes in her life to the ink on her skin. She could not blame the tattoos for the life she had led.

She slowly let go of her suspicion of them, her distaste. Still, she covered them, whether they stayed on her skin for an hour or a day or a week, or were one of the few constants.

_Annoying_ had a tendency to pop up often, but _infuriating_ had appeared on her lower back and was staying.

The tattoos were easy enough to cover, since the chill had yet to leave Mistward. This high in the mountains, she had to wonder if it ever did. The thought was a comfort, sometimes. The chill in the air made her teeth chatter and her bones ache in the night, but perhaps it could keep away the fire in her veins.

One day _annoying_ had slipped on to her knuckles while she chopped the vegetables for breakfast. Luca’s eyes widened, and he stumbled backwards watching the ink twine over Celaena’s hand. She pulled out the gloves she had in a pocket and put them on, almost by instinct.

She had already decided Luca wasn’t the one. For one, he was _Luca_ , and for another, she wasn’t sure he had ever thought anything so bad about anyone as what appeared on her skin every day. Not that the insults narrowed down the pool—she was certain that everyone in the fortress felt similarly, save Luca and perhaps Emrys.

Celaena felt that covering the tattoos was for the best, for everyone involved. Obviously no one would want the mess she had become, even if some nebulous fate had decreed they would. The tattoos that crawled across her skin only confirmed what she thought. Whoever they were, they wanted nothing to do with her.

Which was fine with Celaena. She had no heart left to love with. It had been tortured with Sam, blinded and suffocated in the mines, and killed alongside Nehemia.

She didn’t know why Nehemia thought her death would change anything. Hadn’t she seen how desperately Celaena was clinging to the edge of sanity? The gods took and took from her, but Celaena had held on for ten years. It was Nehemia who had pushed Celaena over the edge. 

If her heart was still working like it should, Celaena thought that would have made her very, very angry.


	4. Chapter 4

Maeve is planning something. Whatever it is, Rowan doesn’t know. He supposes it doesn’t particularly matter; he will serve her all the same. But the gleam in her eyes when she tells him that Aelin Galathynius is coming to Wendlyn is too predatory for Rowan to feel comfortable.

It is not his place to question. He waits in Varese for the princess to arrive. He is wary of her; she was supposed to be dead. Maeve had smiled when she heard of the princess’ death—it was a neutralized threat. Now the princess was apparently alive again, and had been cultivating a reputation as an assassin to boot.

Rowan stifled his anger at not having been told sooner. Aelin Galathynius was a threat once again, and Maeve had only told him when the princess had been nearly on the doorstep of their kingdom.

Not even Maeve’s spies knew when exactly Aelin would arrive, but they all agreed that Aelin would find her way to Varese to assassinate the Ashryver royal family. Rowan thought that if the girl had any sense, she would join them instead. But he knew nothing of this barely-grown child, and so he flew in the skies above Varese, ever watchful.

It took him longer than he cared to admit to retrieve her. He had spotted a hooded figure eyeing the royal castle, but he hung back. He wondered if the figure had noticed the same gap in the castle defenses that he had; he wondered if the figure would kill the royal family that very day. Or try to, at least. Rowan didn’t bother to alert the Ashryvers to the fault in their guard rotation, but he _would_ intervene if their lives were in danger. After all, the Ashryvers were a vital ally against Adarlan.

The figure had stared for a moment longer, and Rowan saw Galan Ashryver ride through the city beneath him. He had met him, a few times. The boy would make a good king when the time came, if he survived his endless blockade running.

Rowan circled above the figure still crouching on the roof, holding his magic close in case they decided they would move against Galan now. It would be difficult, damn near suicidal, but if it _was_ Aelin Galathynius, and she lived up to her reputation, it would be possible.

The figure did not move for Galan. They moved away, and Rowan let go of his magic, letting the regular dry winds of Wendlyn carry him higher.

It was only another day before he decided the figure was, without a doubt, Aelin Galathynius. Rowan kept close, although not too close at first. He wasn’t sure if she had been trained how to recognize a Fae in animal form, or if she remembered enough of magic to recognize his own. She kept away from the parts of Varese where magic-wielders dwelled; he didn’t yet know whether that was a coincidence or not.

He spent six days watching Aelin Galathynius. He spent the first few days convinced that she would make a move towards the Ashryvers, but she never returned to the royal castle. In fact, she spent her days on rooftops more often than not.

It was bizarre. Rowan had been warned to be on edge, that Aelin Galathynius was a heartless assassin, who would now have access to the deadlier parts of her arsenal, the parts that had been sleeping for ten years. There were whispers of fear in Doranelle, only where Maeve couldn’t hear—whispers that dreaded what Aelin Galathynius had become. She could have become their worst nightmare, a child once feared now grown into a weapon of death.

This was not a weapon of death in front of Rowan. He didn’t know what she was, yet. He only knew one thing for sure—Aelin was not a threat.

Just as he thought it, she bolted upright, looking dizzy and still drunk. The perfect opportunity to retrieve her for Maeve.

Rowan slipped into a darkened alcove to shift, and cursed himself for waiting so long. He didn’t know why he had—had he hoped Aelin would move to assassinate the Ashryvers? Did he want to see if she would be a challenge for him?

Then Rowan thought of what day it was and nearly lost his breath. Gods, it was the anniversary of Lyria’s death, nearly midday, and he hadn’t realized it until now.

The tide of grief came over him again, and he reached up out of instinct to the ink on the side of his face. Lyria’s ink had rested there, once. That tattoo had been his favorite of all the ones she had given him.

Rowan shook his head until the grief abated enough for him to think.

He had wasted enough time. It was long past due for Maeve to meet Aelin Galathynius.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THAT'S RIGHT KIDS TWO CHAPTERS IN ONE DAY!!

Celaena left Mistward.

Or tried to, at least. She couldn’t even do this one thing right.

She had been drowning in Mistward, slowly and surely. Celaena had let go of the suspicion of her tattoos, but they still wore away at her like a chisel at marble. Rowan threw insults at her, and whoever her soulmate was did the same. Every. Godsdamned. Day.

_Coward._

_Petulant._

_Vain._

_Child._

_Disrespectful._

She couldn’t take it one more day, so she tried to leave, to save her life while she still could. Of course it almost got her killed. Celaena was sure the gods were howling with laughter at that.

Still, Celaena couldn’t forget that Rowan had been the one to save her life. On his queen’s orders, as he always reminded her, but things got better after that. Somewhat better.

_Spoiled_ , which had been her companion for nearly the longest by now, disappeared suddenly one evening. She had been washing dishes while Emrys told stories, nearly everyone from Mistward crammed into the kitchens, when there was a dull itch along the back of her left thigh. Celaena had stiffened, paranoid that someone had noticed or seen, but—of course they hadn’t. The long surcoat that she had been given covered her almost entirely.

Once Emrys finally ran out of stories for the night, and Celaena was back in her room, she had immediately thrown off her surcoat and twisted around to see her thigh. Just as she thought, the back of it was smooth and pale, as though nothing had ever been there at all.

The insults still came, but slower, now. They didn’t shift with the hours as they used to. She still did nothing about them, though. She marked when they came and left, but she never sought out whosever thoughts lay so violently on her skin.  

Was it wrong to ignore them? Many people said that the soulmate marks were sent from the gods, a gift to their children below to find their fated love. But Celaena had known for years that she didn’t need to be with her soulmate to be with someone she loved. Sam was proof enough of that.

Celaena glanced down at the tattoos again and frowned. What had changed? Why was she was so reluctant to ignore them? She supposed it was because the marks themselves had changed, in a way. They were no longer her yearly companions, cold and dead on her skin. Their constant changes reminded her that she was _so close_ to her soulmate—but the thought of seeking them out…terrified her. Love was a poisoned wine in her hands; it was sweet and silky on her tongue, and it whispered such beautiful things to her, but in the end all it did was hurt.

She forced herself away from such thoughts. Things were better, truly. Gods, she had missed her Fae body, as much as Arobynn had taught her to fear and hate it. Every fiber of her being sang when she ran through the trees, fast enough that they blurred next to her, even with Rowan running beside her.

Celaena still wasn’t what she had been, but she was _something_ again. Her heart fluttered in her chest, even if it was just an echo.

Then came a storming night, and a mountain lion soaked to the bone, and Rowan was saying words that crushed that echoing heartbeat in her chest.

Her skin was buzzing buzzing buzzing

And then she was numb.


	6. Chapter 6

Rowan doesn’t feel many things anymore. He remembers life before Lyria’s death, the way that his heart had bloomed like a flower in spring. He remembers it like a dream, and with every passing year he has to reach further and further to remember that dream.  

Mostly Rowan is angry. At himself. At the girl he’d been forced to train. (At Maeve, in the stray moments before he catches himself.)

But now he is afraid.

Rowan can’t remember the last time he felt fear. He is powerful, and old enough to have seen most of what the world has to offer. He fears none of it. Many of the things that roam the wilds shy away from him—and the things that do not he doesn’t fear either. He lost any fear of his own death the day that Lyria died. 

So his racing heart and sweaty palms feel unfamiliar, but he recognizes it.

Fear.

 _Bastard_ was written on his skin. A cosmic joke. Two hundred and three years of nothing—of skin so empty that it ached—and now, even more horrible, it was being covered in ink again.  

The ink was a mockery of what Lyria had once put on his skin. Every mark left from her was sweet, like a love letter into itself. Lyria had always seen the best in him, even when he was sure there was nothing there. Maybe Rowan had been better back then. He remembered being _more._

He couldn’t go through this again. He couldn’t. It was useless to even wonder where the ink was coming from, who was thinking these words—there were thousands, thousands and thousands, who would call Rowan Whitethorn a bastard.

Or it might be no one at all. It might be a punishment from the gods for everything he had done. Rowan always knew it would catch up to him. He just thought he would be dead first.  

 

Rowan saw Aelin’s ink the day that he met her. The very tip of a tattoo was visible on the back of Aelin’s neck, lines too dark and perfect to have been made by human hands. At first he didn’t care, regarding her with the same apathy he treated the rest of the world with. Then he wondered—but his curiosity was a cold, vicious thing. He wondered to himself who could possibly love this spoiled, infuriating creature.

It was only later that he thought he knew. With her blood running down his chin and another male’s scent on his tongue, he thought he had learned whose ink Aelin wore.

He spat out her blood. It tasted of wildfire.

And then he wondered, with a curiosity that was not as cold or vicious as it had been. Aelin had said that she and the male he’d tasted were no longer together. That this male was repulsed by her. Rowan didn’t know if that was true, and Aelin’s ink came from elsewhere, or if it was a lie, a mere lover’s quarrel that would be resolved.

He told himself it didn’t matter. He would train Aelin until she was ready to go before his queen, and then she would sail across the ocean, and find the male whose ink she wore.

It was weeks later before Rowan told her why males weren’t approaching her. Part of the reason, anyway.

Aelin had wrinkled her nose and Rowan had resisted the urge to smile. “They stayed away because I…smell?”

“Your scent says that you don’t want to be approached,” Rowan said. It was true, more or less. Still, Rowan knew quite a few males and females who would have approached Aelin all the same. Mistward was a lonely place. He didn’t say what he was thinking— _they stay away because the ink on your neck says you are eternally fated to another_ —but he thought it was obvious enough.

“Good,” Aelin said. “I’m not interested in men…males.” Her eyes drifted down to the ring she wore. Rowan suspected it was a ring that her soulmate had given to her. His eyes followed hers, watching the way the amethyst caught the light.

“What happens if you become queen? Will you refuse a potential alliance through marriage?” He was still looking at her ring, but it wasn’t what he was really asking. A lover could be set aside; that would be harder to do with a soulmate.

Aelin made some snarky answer, and Rowan smirked, but he still thought of Aelin’s tattoo, the ink that he would catch glimpses of now and then. The only whispers he had heard of Aelin Galathynius as a child had been of her worrisome power, but he wondered to himself if the ink on her skin had bothered her parents just as much as the fire in her blood. Had they wanted her to find happiness with whoever she wanted? Or had the ink been a wrench in their plans, turning Aelin into a chess piece that couldn’t be used? It was a common enough dilemma for nobles, and everyone responded to the challenge differently. 

Aelin had no intention of being queen, Rowan knew that. He suspected his aunt had a different opinion on the matter. Still, he couldn’t help wondering what had made her hate her crown so vehemently.

In the drowsy moments right before sleep, his mind wandered carelessly and Rowan wondered if it was the ink on her skin that kept her running from her crown.

 

Time passed and Rowan's anger towards Aelin dampened. She was still infuriating, of course, but there were moments when she made his lips twitch into a smile without him realizing it. She was annoying and stubborn and occasionally petulant, but there was something about her that intrigued Rowan all the same. He felt he almost grasped it the first time she was able to deliberately shift into her Fae form. They had run through the woods, and he had felt the fear gripping his lungs turn into something else, something breathless and intangible and written in their silken movements through the forest—and then they stopped, lungs heaving, and whatever word Rowan had gotten close to drifted just out of view again.

Then Gavriel came, and everything was ruined.

Rowan couldn’t remember exactly what had happened. He may have been immortal, blessed with reflexes far superior to any human, but time seemed to be moving too quickly that night.

Gavriel had arrived with too-heavy eyes, and Rowan had held a needle in his hand. He carefully sculpted the tattoos on his friend’s skin although his throat was aching at the sight.

It was a quiet moment for both of them, wrapped in the ghosts of the past. Rowan heard Lyria’s voice every time he tattooed another, and he could hear Gavriel gently murmuring the names of his fallen soldiers. The air was heavy with pain, as it always was for this. They would lean into the pain, feel its sharp edge against their skin, and then Gavriel would walk away, his pain turned to ink and his shoulders lighter.

Rowan could never walk away. The pain stayed with him, always.

Then Aelin walked in, all flippant glances and wildfire. Rowan wanted to scream and yell. Couldn’t she see the agony in the air? Couldn’t she see Rowan was drowning in it? 

She left but she didn’t leave. Rowan could hear her breathing, smell her scent, and even as Gavriel gestured him onward, he couldn’t let it go. This was sacred and solemn but the anger in his veins was too loud. 

He stormed outside, where Aelin was waiting. Rowan just needed to vent the anger, he told himself. That was all. 

He had just intended to growl and threaten and posture, scare the princess away for a few hours. He was doing just that. Then—

“But you just _left_ me downstairs. You left me. I have no one left. No one.”

He was going to die. His chest was turning inside out and his heart was splitting at the seams.  

Rowan had left her and Aelin was saying the same words that Lyria said to him every night and the ink on his skin itched and itched and itched and he could not bear it one moment longer.

“There is nothing I can give you. Nothing I _want_ to give you. You are not owed an explanation for what I do outside of training. I don’t care what you have been through or what you want to do with your life. The sooner you can sort out your whining and self-pity, the sooner I can be rid of you. You are nothing to me, and I _do not care_.”

There were words coming out of his mouth. He was saying something.

He knew it, but his head was screaming too loudly to hear what he was saying.

Aelin was walking away.  

He had left her he had left her he had left her _he had left her_

He didn’t know if he meant Aelin or Lyria.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :))


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi everybody!!!!!! I just want to say two things: thank you SO, SO MUCH to everyone who has commented, or bookmarked, or subscribed, or left kudos, and thank you so much to everyone for sticking around!!! I want to apologize for not updating--believe me when I say it's not because I didn't want to! I started college and have been insanely, insanely busy, and finding time to write has been nearly impossible. Still, I love seeing kudos and comments and everything else that tells me people are still interested in this fic. 
> 
> Side note: as everyone probably knows, lots of the dialogue in this fic is taken directly from Heir of Fire, because it is meant to be canon compliant. I obviously take no credit for any of the dialogue that SJM has written, and I thought I would add this on because this chapter is particularly dialogue heavy. 
> 
> Thank you so much again, and enjoy!!

Celaena walked and walked until she collapsed by the edge of a lake, her shaking legs the only thing she felt.

Celaena was a tool. She knew this. She was a tool to be used by the gods and Elena and whoever else—she had resigned herself to that fight. After all, Celaena hadn’t wanted to be a person anymore. People had feelings and emotions and what she remembered of them was just aching, aching pain.

But somewhere along the way she had lost her path. Her heart wasn’t the cold metal she had wanted it to be; it was cold, to be sure, but it was the clammy cold that came with something that was dying. Celaena had dared to be more, to _want_ more, and this was the punishment she got.  

She was a broken thing now.

Over the sound of her sobbing Celaena could hear her mother’s voice, soothing and calm.

_Why are you crying, Fireheart?_

It had to be a memory, a name and piece of her past as distant and faded as the old tattoos on her skin. Gone but never truly forgotten.

“Because I am lost,” Celaena whispered, a sob still stuck in her throat, “and I do not know the way.”

It was perhaps the truest thing she had said in a long time. Celaena hadn’t felt at home in ten years. Not since her family was ripped away from her and strange ink had told her she ought to be dead.

Celaena closed her eyes. She had been fighting for other people for so long. She was tired. Tired of it all.  

 

Rowan came for her. She sensed his magic before she sensed him, a wave of crackling cold air like the moment before a lightning strike.

It was a difficult thing for Celaena to admit she had needed him to. He could have broken her in two, permanently, but he had come back for her.

“You want to talk about it?” Rowan asked.  

“No,” Celaena said. She shook her head once to rid the last vestiges of her mother’s memory from her. Now was not the time to drown in what had been.

Rowan was quiet beside her, his breaths too even to be anything but carefully measured. For a moment, Celaena thought he might leave it at that, that he would get up without another word and walk away from her. But he didn’t.

“Good,” he said. “Because we’re going.”

“ _Bastard_ ,” she hissed. A shadow flashed in Rowan’s eyes. Celaena ignored it. “Going where, exactly?”

His smile was slow and sad. She might have wondered why, but he spoke again. “I think I’ve started to figure you out, Aelin Galathynius.”

The name didn’t hurt her as much as she was expecting.

 

Sometimes Celaena’s stay at Mistward felt like a dream. Or maybe a nightmare.

Now was one of those times.

“Tell me I’m hallucinating,” she said, her breath a frozen cloud in front of her, like the frozen lake inches from her toes. The frozen lake with _Luca_ in the middle.

And, of course, Rowan wanted her to retrieve him.

She stepped onto the ice, quietly cussing at Rowan while she slid along as carefully as she could. The lake was even more eerie in her Fae form, where her eyes caught on even more weapons buried into the lakebed, everything permeated with the faint smell of death and decay.

“It’s just an old lake,” Celaena whispered.

The ice cracked under her feet.  

“ _Stop it_ ,” she hissed. Her magic swelled in her, and she tried to clamp it down, but it flowed like an overfilled pot, rushing to her aid.

Celaena took a deep breath, forcing the heartbeat in her chest to slow just like Arobynn had taught her.

Another flash of fire ran through her veins. _Not the best time to think about Arobynn_ , she thought.

Celaena hadn’t felt her magic in so long. It was one thing to hold it for a moment—to hurl it at a skinwalker in the dead of night—but to remain in her Fae form with her power roiling in her veins was another thing entirely. It had been ten years since she had lived with her magic always beside her. She had forgotten what it was like.

Celaena felt the tenuous hold on her power slipping. Then the ice beneath her cracked and groaned, but Rowan called out to her.

“You are in control now. _You_ are its master.”   

She was breathing faster now. She couldn’t help it. Everything was twisted around in her head, all her memories held together in tangled webs, and to think of one was to be caught up in ten more.

Images flashed behind her eyes, almost faster than she could understand them.

The night that her first tattoo had appeared, when her mother had rocked her to sleep, humming quietly even though Celaena could feel her mother’s pounding heart.  

A burning book, destroyed by flames she hadn’t realized had been just behind her fingertips until it was too late.

The night of rain and loss, the one she still didn’t think about.

A door slamming on her hand, pain and blood and screaming and Arobynn’s faint smile of approval. 

It was all tied together by the swirling marks on her skin. They branded her and told her what she was, and she had let them. Master of her magic? She wasn’t even in control of her own skin.

Past and present clashed in her mind, the memory of one tattoo fading into another.

_Brat._

_Dead._

_Threat._

_Spoiled._

_A shame._

_Infuriating._

Rowan was calling out to her again. “You are the keeper of your own fate.”

Her breath hitched. She wanted those words to be real. She wanted it more than anything in that moment.

Celaena closed her eyes for the briefest second and allowed herself to believe Rowan. She had endured years of agony, pain beyond what she could have imagined. The world was cruel and unfair—but it did not control her.

Her eyes opened and she took in a deep breath. The air was sharp with the chill of Rowan’s magic, and her heart began to calm in her chest. She hummed to herself, shuffling across the ice to the slow beat of a half-remembered song. Her magic quieted and she glanced back at Rowan. He was walking along the shoreline, and Celaena saw him reach inside a crevice before she turned back to her task.

It was difficult, but she kept an iron fist on the fire inside her. She freed Luca and felt a dull itch between her shoulder blades. She stiffened, and she might have wondered about it more—if it were not for the monster under the ice that was suddenly staring up at her.

“Get off the ice _now_ ,” Celaena whispered, shoving Luca in front of her. There was another itch, one that stretched down her hip and onto her thigh, but she had no time to think about it. She didn’t dare to look away for from that gleaming red eye, not for a second.

“Holy gods,” Luca said, ignoring Celaena’s warning. “What is that?”

“Shut up and go,” she hissed.

“Now, Luca,” Rowan called out, his voice low and strained over the ice.

Celaena kept Luca in front of her until Rowan made them a path of thicker ice to shore. “ _Go_ ,” she told him. For once, he listened to her. Celaena could die today; she had accepted that fate. But if Luca died—if the bright-eyed, hopeful youth died today, Celaena would haunt Rowan for the rest of his days. She would find him in hell, if it came to that.

Anger and fear hummed low in her chest, and Celaena made it into a tool. She sharpened her heart, as she had always been taught, and thought of nothing but surviving the next minute.

She shuffled across the ice, faster and faster until she was on shore and running, sprinting alongside Luca and Rowan.

The new mark along her leg pulsed with each step. She continued to ignore it. She had to.  

 

Mistward finally came into sight and Celaena breathed out. “Go ahead,” she told Luca. “And don’t you dare breathe a word of what happened.”

He nodded, his face pale enough that she believed him, and he ran towards the fortress without another word.

She turned to find Rowan behind her, panting slightly. The anger and fear that had been humming softly all the while swelled into a crescendo that pounded against her chest.

“I will _kill_ you,” she yelled, throwing herself at him. He was stronger, and faster, and more experienced, but Celaena was _angry_.

She managed to pin him and his eyes widened. “If you _ever_ again bring someone else into this, if you ever endanger _anyone_ else the way you did today—” Celaena struck the tattoo on his face. She couldn’t stand the sight of ink right now. “I will _kill_ you.” She heaved a trembling breath, and realized that Rowan wasn’t fighting back. He took her blows like he felt he deserved them. “I will rip out your rutting throat. You understand?”

He was silent and Celaena thought she might explode. Her magic still roiled within her, demanding action and justice. She lost focus for just a moment, trying to quiet her power, but it was enough for Rowan to flip her over, and then Celaena was the one pinned.  

“I will do whatever I please,” Rowan said, blood dripping down his face.

“You will keep other people out of it! _No one else!_ ”

“Tell me why, Aelin,” he said, his voice soft.

It was too much. She had been suffering for years and it was _too much_.

“Because I am sick of it!” She gasped for breath, words flowing out of her before she even realized what she was saying. “I told her I would not help, so she orchestrated her own death. Because she thought . . . she thought that her death would spur me into action. She thought I could somehow do more than her—that she was worth more dead. And she lied—about everything. She lied to me because I was a coward, and I hate her for it. I hate her for leaving me.”

Celaena shuddered as all her anger left her, drained by the confession that had been seeping in her for weeks. Maybe years. Everyone left Celaena. _Everyone._ Her parents and her uncle and Aedion and Sam and Nehemia—they had all left her alone.

Rowan was still above her, close enough that the heat from his body radiated onto hers.

“Please. Please don’t bring anyone else into it. I will do anything you ask of me. But that is my line. Anything else but that.”

Rowan let her go and moved away, and Celaena was cold.

“How did she die?” he asked.

It hurt to tell him, like a burning deep in her heart, but Celaena remembered a day long ago when she had visited a healer.

She had been young, young enough that she was still a princess named Aelin, and young enough that her parents were still comfortable bringing her out in public. They had been on a brief tour of Terrasen to introduce her to some of her future citizens, and they had stopped in a small village with a powerful healer.

“I want to be like you when I’m older,” Aelin had said. She was sure, now, that her parents had frowned at that, but she hadn’t noticed at the time. She had been too intent on the healer in front of her, who radiated a tranquil calm that Aelin had never seen before. “But the palace physician says I have too much fire.”

The healer had smiled, and knelt in front of Aelin. Aelin had smiled back at her. “Fire can be purifying,” the healer had said. “It can close wounds and stop infection just as any other healing magic can.” The healer had run a gentle hand over Aelin’s hair, and Aelin thought she would burst with happiness. It was the first time that someone had told her she could be a healer, fire and all.

Celaena thought of that moment now. Fire could hurt, but it could also heal. And the healer from her memory reminded her of Rowan, in a way. He wasn’t like others who tried so hard to forget about Celaena’s magic, who tried to limit her in some way so it was easier for them to accept her. How many people had done that? Her parents, certainly. Arobynn had. Chaol had, and it had broken them.

Celaena glanced towards Rowan one last time before they stepped through the wards, the fortress ahead of them lit with torches against the growing night.

The word _home_ echoed in her mind, quiet and sure.   

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> By the way, I have a new story idea that I really want to write, but I'd love to write for a pairing other than Aelin and Rowan. Are there are any ships (TOG/ACOTAR or otherwise!) that you guys would like to see in an upcoming modern AU? Let me know and I'll consider any and all ideas you guys have!


	8. Chapter 8

Gods, sometimes he forgot how young Aelin was. Rowan thought of the first time he had heard of her, when she had only been six years old. And he had told Maeve that she was a _threat_.

The part of his brain that functioned as a commander of Maeve’s forces whispered that she still was, if Aelin ever decided to move against Maeve. Rowan had felt Aelin’s magic; he had _felt_ the behemoth that lay beneath the surface.

But then he looked at her sitting by that lake, curled up into herself so that she seemed like the furthest thing from a threat that Rowan could think of. She looked young, and vulnerable, all the things that Rowan had forgotten existed in this world.

He had forgotten, or maybe had never realized at all, that he could hurt Aelin like that. She had built such walls around herself that even though Rowan could see they existed, he had assumed a fortress lay behind them.

But Aelin wasn’t a fortress. Or a monster. Or a threat. She was nothing like he had ever thought she was.

Rowan settled down next to Aelin, and she said nothing. He could see that careful blankness in her eyes beginning to settle in again, and he realized it was her preparing for the worst. Preparing for what he might do to her.

There was a sharp pang in his heart. “You want to talk about it?” he asked.

“No,” she said.

“Good,” he said. A small lie, because there was a growing part of him that wanted to hear about what her young shoulders had to carry. What had happened to turn the most feared child in the world to what was in front of him now. “Because we’re going,” he continued.

“ _Bastard_ ,” she said, like an arrow straight to his heart. “Going where, exactly?”

There was her defense mechanism, right on cue. Rowan tried to smile. “I think I’ve started to figure you out, Aelin Galathynius.”

And what a sorrowful thing she was.

 

Rowan thought the lake was empty. He really, truly did.

Aelin probably wouldn’t believe him. She would probably think it was another test, Rowan trying to stack the odds against her as he had admittedly been doing the last few weeks.

But he hadn’t been doing that _today_. Today had been about breaking through all the barriers Aelin had up, and Rowan couldn’t help the small spark of pride he felt when he saw her struggling with her power, only to overcome it. The smell of smoke in the air disappeared, and Rowan fought a smile even as Aelin turned back to glare at him. As he had frozen this lake, he had wondered if Aelin would truly be up to the task. He had blustered earlier that if she sank Luca, he would let it happen—but he wouldn’t, not really.

(A couple of weeks ago, maybe. But not today.)

_She’s starting to control her power_ , Rowan marveled. It was a beautiful sight to see for anyone well-versed in magic—it was like watching a talented dancer, or hearing a virtuosic musician. It was just like what his aunt had told Aelin the night they met—it didn’t matter that Aelin had an army’s worth of power inside her. It mattered what she did with it.

The thought of Maeve put a sour taste in his mouth, and Rowan turned away. He scanned the weapons on the ground, some so old that he couldn’t mark their origin. Rowan had heard rumors of this cave…

There was a small crevice in the wall. Small enough to be overlooked for hundreds of years. Maybe thousands.

Rowan could see something gleaming inside and his breath caught. His mind was working too fast, thinking of a plan that he couldn’t bear to put words to, but that might just work—

“ _Control_ ,” he called out to Aelin. He pulled out the sword he had seen and forced his mind blank, like he was always did when he was disobeying Maeve. Was this disobeying her?

_Yes_ , his mind said. Rowan chose to ignore that. Aelin freed Luca, without injuring or sinking either one of them, and Rowan let himself smile. In that moment, she was more in control of her power than he had ever seen. The potential that he had glimpsed was right there in front of him.

(He should have been thinking about how to build from this moment so she would be ready for Maeve. He wasn’t.)

Later, he would think about why he didn’t notice the lake was occupied. He should have, surely. The monster inside must have been asleep when he froze the lake, but when it woke, it would have changed the flow of the lake’s water. Rowan should have noticed the changes his magic would make to compensate for that. Was it because he was too caught up in Aelin’s magic, the feel of an ocean of fire against his ice? Or was it because of the sword, of the plan-that-was-not-a-plan in the back of his head?

It was useless to think of it later, just as it had been useless to wonder in the moment. Rowan had sensed the danger too late, and it was all he could do to keep a layer of ice between Aelin, Luca, and whatever monster lay at the bottom of the lake.

All thoughts flew from his mind except for a select few. They ran through his head over and over: He had to get them out of there. It was his fault that they were in danger.

Luca was in danger.

Aelin was in danger.

Aelin was in danger.

Aelin was in danger.

The thought pulsed in his head almost uncontrollably as they ran out of the cave and into the forest. Aelin had a death grip on Luca, and the instant they were off the ice, Rowan melted it with half a thought, plunging the monster back beneath the water. It bellowed in frustration, and although Rowan could hear it thrashing in the water instead of crawling onto land, he had a shield at their back as they sprinted down the mountainside.

The obsessive thought that Aelin—and Luca, too, he realized—was in danger began to dull, and faded away as they finally stopped. Aelin sent Luca ahead, and Rowan stopped behind her, still catching his breath.

Gods, he had made a mess of this.

He opened his mouth, to say what he wasn’t sure, but then Aelin was upon him like a wildcat.

It was the most unhinged he had ever seen her. The violence that she walked with—the kind that was written into her step, the kind that Rowan could tell had been trained into her for years—unraveled into a desperate, wild thing. She managed to pin him, surprisingly, but she was too distracted to keep him down.

“You will keep other people out of it—no one else!” she screamed, and Rowan held back the wince at those words. There was pain behind them, such agonizing pain he felt weighed down just to see it lingering behind her eyes.

“Tell me why, Aelin.”

Rowan fought to keep his voice steady. He wanted to know, so badly. He wanted to know what had happened to make Aelin’s voice so twisted with pain. He wanted to know what had happened to her, how she survived and how she had fallen. He wanted to taste her blood again, to know whose ink she wore and if she was running from them or to them.

He was horrible. The worst kind of horrible.

But she answered him. Rowan learned a small piece of her past, and that would have to be enough.

He leaned away from her, suddenly aware of how close he was. His head felt stuffed and slow, and he tried to remember why they were here. Rowan was not here to learn Aelin’s life story. He was here to prepare her for Maeve, and then Aelin would leave and Rowan would move on with his life.

But as they walked back, the silence between them for once not laced with vitriol, the only thought echoing through Rowan’s head was that Aelin was safe.

 

They made it back to Mistward, and Rowan watched closely as Aelin fell to her knees and apologized to Emrys, Luca, and Malakai. She was…a very different person than his aunt was. She would be a very different kind of queen, if anyone ever convinced her to follow that path.

He couldn’t stop thinking, especially, of how different she was than what he had been told.   

Then Aelin said, almost shyly, “We had an adventure today.”

A whisper of a smile was on Rowan’s lips, even as Aelin asked Emrys if he knew the monster that lay under the lake. “He can’t know that story,” Rowan said carefully while he glanced at Emrys. “No one does.”

It was more of a question than a statement, a silent imploring towards Emrys, and Rowan could barely hide his sigh of relief when Emrys began to tell them what he knew. What Rowan had suspected already.  

Rowan let Emrys finish the story of the beast before he began asking questions.

“Who was the warrior who carved out its eye?” He asked Emrys the most probing questions he could, although he felt the blood oath beginning to tighten like a collar around his neck. He glanced at Aelin, and he hoped the young queen would understand what he meant.

He would not allow himself to think of it. Thinking of it would mean the blood oath would truly choke him. Instead he continued his passing questions and his glances, skirting around what he really wanted to say.

Then Aelin tensed beside him, and he could _feel_ her resisting the urge to look at the sword by the door. Her hand strayed towards her pocket, and Rowan prayed to all the gods above that she had gotten what he had seen in the scabbard.

He hid his smile with a drink of water. She had figured it out. Hopefully. That was enough for now.

Rowan did not let himself think about _why_ he wanted Aelin, so badly, to figure out the exact power and leverage that he had given her in that sword. He went back to his room and resolved to think no more on her, pulling out the map that marked where all the husks of bodies had been found. He had looked at it again and again, finding no pattern, and he doubted that he would now, but it gave his mind something to focus on.

Rowan let his eyes drift over the map, the analytical part of his brain taking over. It felt almost like a relief after the weariness of the day, and it meant that the uncomfortable tug of the blood oath relaxed against his throat. He wasn’t doing anything wrong.

And then, because fate rutting hated him, there was Aelin, knocking at his door.

“ _What_?” he snarled. She walked into his room, and he could see the hesitation in her body. Rowan forced himself to relax, to not go on the offensive. “What do you want?”

“I thought you might want this.” She tossed something to him. The healing salve.

His heart beat once with something that felt too much like fear. Aelin cared. She cared what he thought and she cared about his pain and that was somehow more terrifying than anything Rowan had known in a long time.

Rowan told himself to relax again. He couldn’t exactly tell Aelin to leave— _yes, Aelin, I need some alone time where I can pretend that I haven’t felt anything in two hundred years and I don’t think about what your blood tasted like or what you smell like or what—_

Maybe Rowan hated himself more than he realized, because before he knew it, his mouth opened and he told Aelin about his mate.

He didn’t mean to. They were the words written on his heart, that he held so tightly they branded his heart, burned it and turned it into the unrecognizable lump that it was. He had held them so tightly he hadn’t spoken of them in…he didn’t know how long.   

Rowan knew he shouldn’t have told Aelin. He was supposed to be teaching her magic, for gods sakes. He knew he was torturing himself, playing into whatever was between them, looking at the words inked on his skin whenever he was alone, thinking about what Lyria would think of all this—but he couldn’t help himself.

And gods curse him, he held out a hand to Aelin, and his mind went silent with how badly he wanted her to reach out in turn. This was wrong. Maybe she didn’t know it yet, but Rowan did.

For a moment he thought she wouldn’t take his hand. She would do the right thing, and turn away in anger, and she would save him from himself.

But she didn’t.

“Together,” she said, and Rowan let out a quiet sigh and tried not to let anything show as she reached for his offered hand. Their skin brushed and he could almost feel the fire living under her skin.

It should have felt wrong. It should have felt like a betrayal—of Lyria, of the taunting new ink on his skin.

Instead all Rowan felt was the tightening of the blood oath around his throat, drowned out by the sudden warmth in his chest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys!! Thank you SO SO much for being patient with me and waiting for this next chapter (sorry it's so rough and unedited, big off)! There are have been so many kudos, comments, and subscriptions on this fic, and I’m grateful!!
> 
> I also have some really exciting news: I’m home for winter break! That means that I’ll finally have time to finish this fic, and hopefully sic itur too. And….*drum roll please* my NaNoWriMo book!! It’s an original work I’m really excited about, and I’m hoping to get it done soon as well. If there’s any interest, I'll post it on here for you guys to read (and I might also end up doing self publishing with it too!). 
> 
> (also, would there be any interest/support in me making a kofi? ya girl is a v broke college student--i'd also be open to doing writing commissions!) 
> 
> Anyway, I love you guys to bits. Thank you for sticking around.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry i'm #theworst at updating, but WE ARE FINALLY NEARING THE END KIDS!! 
> 
> Also, not to self promo, but "astra inclinant" is ALMOST at 400 kudos!! Please check it out and leave kudos if you haven't already (and only if you want to, obvi). Thank you!!

Celaena had been close to falling asleep when she had remembered how she’d hurt Rowan. So she had gotten up, expecting nothing more than another verbal sparring match, although she had to least _try_ to give him the healing salve.

Instead, Rowan told her about his mate, about how she had died when he left her alone. That’s what Celaena had said to him before. _You left me._

Celaena of all people knew what it was to be haunted by words. How they could breathe down your neck and weigh down your bones.

It hurt at first. _Gods_ did it hurt. She could practically feel the ink from her own mate crawling on her skin, a mockery of what Rowan had. What he used to have. He spoke Lyria’s name like she was a goddess, and in Celaena’s mind she could see her mother and father smiling at each other, the words on their skin a delight and sometimes a secret. It hurt to know that wasn’t the fate that was waiting for her.

But Rowan had survived without his mate. He said they would find their way out together. And if he could survive for hundreds of years with the loss of his mate—then Celaena could deal with a soulmate that hated her. She could do that.

After she had returned to her own room, the word _together_ swirling around her mind, Celaena recalled the telltale itching from earlier that day. She had half a mind to ignore the new tattoos, but…that wasn’t a solution either. It had never worked for her in the end.

She lit a candle and drew up her tunic, looking down at her hip where the second itch had been.

The skin was blank.

Her brows furrowed. It must have disappeared sometime later that day. She usually noticed when they came and went, but she had been busy.

“Fine,” Celaena muttered, turning her back to her mirror and shrugging off her undershirt so she could see if the tattoo between her shoulder blades was still there. 

The words were still there, small enough that she had to squint to see them.

_In control._

A shuddering breath left her. She closed her eyes, and she prayed. She prayed that this was a sign from the gods that Rowan hadn’t been lying to her earlier, that the deepest hopes of her heart could be true. That she would no longer be tossed about as their plaything, a ragdoll for the gods to use as they wanted.

Running across a lake covered with Rowan’s ice, a monster at her heels, Celaena was the closest she had been to death in a while. She had felt true fear rushing through her veins, her magic roaring to save her, rescue her, help her.

It should have been horrible. Yet in the end she had found herself smiling, close to laughter.

Life was that way, it seemed. Rowan told her of his long dead mate, but Celaena could still her ghost in his eyes. She told him of some of the things in her heart, and he listened. It hurt, but it healed them.

The next day, there were times when their conversation ran too close to an open wound for her comfort.

Celaena had been fixing Rowan’s tattoos when she made a careless comment about shackles. Rowan had noticed, of course, the way he seemed to notice everything.

“What do you mean, _another_ set of shackles?”

Celaena managed to dodge the true answer well enough, but Rowan kept asking questions.

“Why did you stay with Arobynn?”

Her mouth tightened. “I knew I wanted two things,” she began. “First, to disappear from the world and from my enemies, but . . .” Celaena focused on the tattoo in front of her to avoid looking at Rowan. “I wanted to hide from myself, mostly. I convinced myself I should disappear, because the second thing I wanted, even then, was to be able to someday . . . hurt people the way I had been hurt. And it turned out that I was very, very good at it.”

_I wanted to hide from myself, mostly._ It was the truth. Almost the entire truth. Rowan might understand if she told him everything—told him that the words written on her skin had always been awful, that at eight years old her mate had thought she was dead and she agreed with them. Arobynn had given Celaena a chance to let Aelin die, to become someone new. And Arobynn would always accept her, no matter how cruel or violent she was. 

But Rowan didn’t need to know about that. He had seen her marks by now, surely, if only because they changed so rapidly she couldn’t always cover them in time, but he didn’t need to know everything about them. He didn’t need to know that they had always been this awful. 

Celaena wondered if he had seen whatever tattoo lay on the back of her neck. It had been one of her longest companions, now that the markings lasted days or weeks instead of years. Whatever was on her neck—too close to her hairline for her to see by using just one mirror—was still a mystery to her.

Celaena brushed her hand over where the ink was, but of course, she couldn’t feel anything. She hadn’t thought of it in so long—she wondered again what it said. If Rowan had seen it. What he thought of it, of every word that he had seen written on her skin. If he agreed with it.

A few weeks ago, she would have said yes. _Two days ago_ , she would have said yes. Now, as Celaena laid down to sleep, she thought—she wondered, she dreamed, she _hoped_ —that he wouldn’t.

 

Things got better. It was frightening to think of how close she had come to drowning that time. Everything in her life, every memory and murder and tattoo had been crawling up her throat and choking her. They had crept into her heart, turning it so dark that she could feel the blood flowing black under her skin.

And hope was as frightening as drowning sometimes. Celaena had been hurt and hurt and hurt, and to hope was an act of rebellion towards everything that told her she would be again. 

But Celaena was never very good at following orders, anyway. 


	10. Chapter 10

Rowan put Aelin in danger again, at Beltane. Just like at the lake, Aelin almost died, and it was because of him.  

He should have seen her heading towards the edge of her magic sooner.

He’d been commanding troops since before Aelin’s parents were born—and most of his troops fought with magic as well as blades. Rowan had long ago learned to recognize the look of someone caught in their magic’s thrall.

Yet he hadn’t seen it in Aelin before it was too late. Rowan had been distracted, if he was being honest with himself. It was an easy lesson to learn, he thought—he was distracted, and it made him unobservant, and it put people in danger. Mostly Aelin, it seemed.  

Somehow it was one thing to understand this perfectly and another to fight against it like a rising tide beating against him.

Rowan had been watching Aelin at Beltane, the way she finally seemed to be letting go with her magic enough to do something useful with it. No one else seemed to recognize the spark in the air, but Rowan could feel Aelin’s magic upon his skin, a pulsating ember that beckoned him closer.

It reminded him of how her blood had tasted, the way it had sparked on his tongue, like her blood had been laced with magic. Rowan had bit her again, when that creature in the forest had her mind trapped. He shouldn’t have, really. Even if Aelin said she was bound to no one, the ink on her skin said she was.

Rowan was the worst kind of despicable to find himself wanting more of that crackling wildfire on his tongue. It haunted him at night, like the ink on his skin. He was sure the gods were laughing uproariously in the heavens.

Knowing that they mocked him didn’t stop him from watching Aelin at Beltane, though. He saw the way Aelin’s eyes tracked her fire, the way her body began to sway slightly, but he wasn’t thinking straight. He sent a cool breeze towards her, and she tipped her head back with such a sigh that for a moment he wasn’t thinking at all.

He should have seen her burnout coming, but he was watching the wrong things.

Then it had been panic, panic and even a hint of fear as he ran through the woods with Aelin in his arms. Her magic seared into his skin, but he ran on. Any pain he felt was only a fraction of what Aelin was experiencing.

(Rowan  _should_ have been afraid because Aelin dying would mean Maeve’s wrath falling upon him, but he didn’t think of Maeve until much later.)

The healers directed him to a bathtub, which he put Aelin in and then immediately pulled her out of. Her magic was lashing out of her wildly and it melted his ice instantly. The healers directed him to another tub and he lowered Aelin in again, her body limp and face crumpled in pain.

_Relax_ , he let his magic whisper to hers, _let her go._

Rowan wrapped Aelin in his magic, and it held her with all his strength. He froze the water around her again and again. Finally her magic abated, and the healers left the room, murmuring in low tones amongst themselves. He questioned Aelin for a few minutes, and tried to impress upon her the seriousness of the situation, but he could see in her eyes she already knew. She had brushed death close enough to feel its touch on her skin; Rowan need not tell her more.

Rowan cooled Aelin off as long as he could, until finally the buzzing in his blood wouldn’t let him stay. He hummed with guilt, loud enough that he almost thought Aelin could hear it.

“I’m going to check on the tonic. I’ll be back soon,” Rowan said, breaking the silence of the room. Aelin nodded slightly, and he noted the way her movements were still stiff and confined. She would likely be in pain for a few days.

He slipped out of the room and found the healers a few doors down the hall. The tonic had to sit for a few more minutes, and they insisted on bandaging Rowan while it waited. He hadn’t realized just how much of his skin had been torched, and the healing salve they put on was a cool relief while his own magic fought to heal the wounds.

The tonic still wasn’t quite ready, but Rowan didn’t want to leave Aelin alone in that room for any longer. He left the healers’ room with a nod, quietly entering the bathing room Aelin was in. It was hushed and quiet as it had been before, and Rowan didn’t even focus on Aelin until he was halfway in the room.

Then he looked up at her, and his breath caught in his throat.

Aelin was curled over her knees with her hair was swept over her shoulder, exposing the elegant line of her neck and leading into the strong shoulders he knew so well. But everything was different tonight—her shoulders were bowed under some impossible weight, and with her hair swept aside, Rowan could finally read the tattoo that peaked out under her hairline. His eyes scanned the word quickly, but then something else caught his eye.

Her back. It was…ruined. There were scars upon scars, the kind that spoke of immense pain and a cruel hand.

“Who did that to you?” His voice was calm, but he didn’t know how. His vision was turning red and rage was boiling in his blood.

“A lot of people,” Aelin said nonchalantly, like they discussing the weather, “I spent some time in the Salt Mines of Endovier.”

_Some time._ Rowan’s eyes caught again on her back, on the layers of scars there. “How long?”

“A year. I was there a year before…it’s a long story.”

His heart nearly stopped in his chest. “You were a slave.” For a _year_. Aelin was barely an adult and she had been there a year, a place rumored to break men in a day.

She nodded, and Rowan had to physically shut his mouth against the growl in his throat. He left the room before Aelin could see the murderous expression on his face. Rowan wanted blood. He wanted _revenge_.

He shifted in an instant and flew atop the mountains. Even in this form, his hawk still howled for the slow, painful death of whoever had done that to Aelin. And the anger was shifting towards Maeve, who had told him nothing of this, who had lied—

Then Rowan heard the howling of Maeve’s wolves, and the rage in his heart stuttered. If he went to confront Maeve…if he went directly to the people who had done this to Aelin…Maeve would call him back to Doranelle, and keep him there. Maeve, who had known Rowan almost as long as he had lived, would see what simmered beneath his eyes. She would _know_ , the way she always seemed to know things, about the black ink that crawled over his skin.

Maeve would keep him in Mistward, and Aelin would be alone. Suddenly Rowan couldn’t stand that thought.

He turned back the way he came, and he left the wolves howling in the mountains.

 

Rowan found Aelin in her pitiful excuse for a room. He hadn’t planned on taking her with him, but he saw the way she shivered, even at the edge of sleep, her body unable to stop convulsing. His mind went blank, the way it had when he’d seen her back, and before he knew it he was carrying her to his room. He was struck with disgust that he had even allowed her to stay there for as long as he had. Rowan remembered, in the beginning, Maeve requesting that Aelin stay in that room. He remembered smiling and agreeing with her, thinking it would teach the spoiled girl something about struggle and humility.

Now he couldn’t imagine why he had ever thought Aelin needed to be taught that. It was a disgrace, in fact, that he had let it go on. It was not something an honorable male would do. Gavriel, if he knew, would be disappointed.  

Aelin didn’t say anything, barely even moving as he put her on his bed and wrapped her in blankets. That’s how he knew how much pain she was in.

He laid down beside her. “You’re staying with me from now on,” Rowan said, trying to keep his anger—anger towards himself—out of his voice.  “The bed is for tonight. Tomorrow, you’ll get a cot. You’ll clean up after yourself or you’ll be back in that room.”

He didn’t mean it. Not a word. He only hoped Aelin didn’t hear the blustering in his voice.

“Very well,” she said, her voice a bit too roughened to pass for haughty. “I don’t want your pity.” Something sparked in her eyes, and Rowan was surprised to feel a panging in his chest too.

“This is not pity. Maeve decided not to tell me what happened to you,” he said, his body tensing again with the need to hunt, to seek out her torturers, to rip them apart. “You have to know that I—I wasn’t aware you had—”

Aelin reached out and grabbed his hand. Her skin was still feverish, and Rowan’s heart beat loudly in his chest. “I knew,” Aelin said, her voice soft and no anger in it. “At first, I was afraid you’d mock me if I told you, and I would kill you for it. Then I didn’t want you to pity me. And more than any of that, I didn’t want you to think it was ever an excuse.”  

“Like a good soldier,” he said. “Tell me how you were sent there—and how you got out.”

She told him. She told him everything.

There were times when it took all he could to stay still, to keep drawing in breath and exhaling steadily, to keep his face still while Aelin told her story. It was…it was a horrible thing. A life of cruelty and pain, of merciless fate and profound agony, where one tragedy fell right after another. Yet it had created the woman in front of him, who spoke without anger and who could still smile with kindness in her eyes. Rowan had to close his eyes more than once with the weight of what he had done to her. He could have been the one to break her, for good. He could have been the one to take this Aelin away from the world, and replace her with a monster as bad as he was.   

He listened to her talk until she couldn’t anymore. He listened to her describe everyone who had been taken from her, everyone who had left or abandoned her or been dragged away from her, and he held her hand against his chest throughout it all.

In the moments right before he fell asleep, long after Aelin had already shut her eyes, he squeezed her hand just once. _I won’t leave you_ , he thought, _Not ever_.

In the morning, he woke up and didn’t remember the thought. If he had, he would have known it was a lie.

 

The next night, Aelin sleeping beside him and still recovering from her near-burnout, Rowan saw the soul tattoo on the back of her neck again, and his brows furrowed.

_Aelin_ was written right under her hairline. It hadn’t struck him as odd the first time he saw it—he had been too focused on those scars running down her back—but now, laying beside her, he examined the trails of ink he could see peeking out from under her hair. He had seen it before, but never the entire word. _Aelin_. Unusual, for a soulmate mark to simply be one’s name. Then again, Aelin was still calling herself Celaena, and perhaps the shock of her heritage made her lover think of her by her real name over anything else. 

She had said nothing more of her lover, not for months. Rowan found his mind wondering to him, even as he kept a constant eye on Aelin sleeping beside him. Last night, when she told him the story of her life, there had been something in her voice when she spoke of the Captain of the Royal Guard. Her mouth had tightened and there was suppressed emotion in her voice, but Rowan couldn’t be sure. He wasn’t sure why it mattered so much to him, either.

Still, he couldn’t tear his mind away from the thought. Aelin slept soundly beside him, and he kept his eyes on the deep black ink on her neck.

Her lover was human; would she outlive him? Would she even return to him when she sailed back to Adarlan? Surely she would, if she wore his ink. But Aelin didn’t often do what Rowan expected.

Rowan told himself that it didn't matter, that Aelin would cross the seas and leave him behind and it wouldn't matter whose bed she was in. Still the thought circled in his mind, over and over, and he pictured her reuniting with a different man, his face in shadow, and the thought made Rowan's stomach turn over. 

 

In retrospect, having Aelin sleep in his room was not the best choice Rowan could have made.

He trained her in the day, and slept by her side at night. It was the kind of arrangement that would have killed one or both of them if it had happened when they met, and Rowan nearly expected the same to happen now.

But it didn’t. The more time he spent with Aelin, the more he saw who she truly was. The walls, the defenses she’d once hissed at him to keep him away—they were gone. Rowan saw who she was, not a spoiled princess, but a warrior with a heart of fire.

Living with her didn’t make Rowan hate her. It made him lay beside her and suffer.

In his darker moments, when he couldn’t stop staring at her and he had to force himself not to smile, a hissing voice told him pathetic he was. How horrible. He was bound in so many ways; there was no way he could have Aelin Galathynius, not in any life.

Rowan was covered in invisible chains, even if Aelin couldn’t see them. Maeve had a collar at his throat. Lyria had a hold on his heart. And there was the new ink on his skin to remind him further that Rowan would never have what he wanted, not ever.

He could practically hear the gods laughing every night as he closed his eyes. 

 

Then Mistward was attacked. Betrayed, and Narrok and his creatures upon them.

Aelin told Rowan she would just hold them off. She told him that she would retreat as soon it became too much.

But she lied. She lied to him.

He tried to get to her. He tried and tried and _tried_ but Gavriel and Lorcan pinned him down. They didn’t understand—he had to get to her—

Rowan screamed and screamed, rage and agony ripping his chest apart as he watched the creatures feed on Aelin. She was alive, he could feel it, but she was suffering, and even a heart of fire couldn’t hold out forever.

Rowan gathered his magic, preparing to strike against Gavriel and Lorcan, even if it meant losing himself to the darkness of those creatures, when a rumbling power shook the earth.

He froze for a moment, hoping and hoping and—

Fire burst from the darkness, the ancient power of a thousand sunrises ripping apart the creatures’ magic. She had done it, his Aelin—she had fought against those creatures of nightmares, and she had risen with her full power around her. She was everything he had hoped, and more.

Aelin smiled when she saw him, and that was all he needed. He sliced open his palm and ran towards her.

She was panting when he reached her, but she cut open her palm. They were _carranam_ , and the knowledge passed unspoken between them. “To whatever end?” she asked.

Rowan nodded, and he thought of what she had said to him just two days before. _“I claim you, Rowan Whitethorn. I don’t care what you say and how much you protest. I claim you as my friend.”_

He had not said anything, then. He had thought only of promises and chains, the ink on his skin, and he had looked away because he was bound too tightly for Aelin to ever set him free.    

But now he clasped her hand, and though he felt his skin buzzing with another line of ink down his back, there was no fear in his heart. There was only their two magics, intertwining with a sense of rightness that Rowan hadn’t felt in a long, long time.

“I claim you, too, Aelin Galathynius,” he whispered, and then a wave of darkness hit them.

 

Aelin slept for two days after the battle, and although she woke in time to say goodbye to Gavriel, Rowan kept them at Mistward for a week. His cadre would have reached Doranelle by now, he knew that, but there was color in Aelin’s cheeks and she smiled more than he had ever seen her. He wanted to let her rest as long as he could. 

A lesser male would have lied to himself, telling himself that tarrying would allow Maeve’s anger to cool. But Rowan knew that Maeve was not the sort to forgive so easily, or so quickly. She was not the sort to forgive at all.  

For everything that he had said, and for everything that he had felt and left unsaid, there was no turning away. It was time, past time, for them to report to Maeve.

 

The morning before they met with Maeve, Rowan rose before Aelin and sat at the edge of the camp to watch the sun rise. He felt warmth wrap around him, and a sense of something _greater_ , something that in all his life he had only felt a few times before.

_Please_ , he prayed. The voice in his head whispered that he was a fool, that he was selfish and horrible and he would die for his sins, but he pushed back against it.

_Please_ , he thought again, not even entirely sure what he was asking. _Help her survive this. Give her guidance and strength and wisdom._ He bit his lip. There was so much more to his _please_ than that. He wondered if Mala was listening, if she understood what he really wanted to say. It was too big and too small for words, all at once.

The sense of something wrapping around him heightened, as if in response. Mala was listening to him, however briefly.

Rowan closed his eyes and heard Aelin begin to rouse behind him. _Please,_ he begged again. He hesitated one final time, but he could hear Aelin beginning to walk over to him.

He asked for his most selfish, impossible wish. 

_When she leaves, let me go with her._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally an update!! Tysm to everyone for being so patient and supportive! 
> 
> Quick question, because I did promote this fic as canon compliant: I have two endings in mind and I thought I would ask you guys which one you prefer (with no spoilers of course). One ending is fairly canon divergent, although the basic dynamics of the books stay the same. The other ending is canon compliant. Which one do you guys want to see?


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